Combatting homelessness requires making tough choices

A homeless woman named Listern got her belongings together as she sat on O'Farrell Street near Union Square Wednesday July 15, 2015. Although San Francisco housed over 3000 homeless people in the last two years, the overall homeless count stubbornly remains about the same.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Nobody in liberal San Francisco wants to be accused of lacking empathy. When someone says, “You’re turning into Donald Trump,” it stings.

It’s why San Francisco sheepishly stands by as the homeless problem spirals out of control. The concept of actually moving people off the streets is fraught with emotion.

If Mayor Ed Lee’s plan to move people off the streets for the Super Bowl gets put in place, you can be sure some agency, probably the Police Department, will be videotaped in a physical confrontation with an obstreperous homeless person, and the shouts of “criminalizing homelessness” or “punishing poverty” will begin.

Advocates, like the Coalition on Homelessness, use those terms for a reason.

It’s those kinds of accusations, Supervisor Scott Wiener points out, that often cause us to back off on responses to bad street behavior. And Wiener makes a distinction: Bad street behavior isn’t synonymous with homelessness. They are two different things, which sometimes overlap.

“They say, ‘You hate the homeless’ or ‘You’re a right-wing Republican,’” Wiener says in a recent blog post. “And it is totally bogus. But they think if they get up on their self-righteous high horse and shake their finger at us, it will shame us into not taking the steps that we need.”

“This is the most compassionate city in the world,” he says. “And that’s why we spend as much as we do. But that doesn’t mean that we have to put up with the antisocial behavior we see every day in the neighborhoods.”

He’s right. We’ve got the spending money part down pat. In fact, although we’ve been saying San Francisco spends $169 million on the homeless services, Wiener’s blog points out that it’s really $230 million. That’s such an enormous hunk of cash, it’s equivalent to half of the entire operating budget for the city of Oakland, which is $459.8 million.

San Francisco Police Officers tell homeless man Nick Shaw to move his encampment from the sidewalk near Division and Bryant streets in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2015.

Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

It’s the other piece of the puzzle that gives us trouble. The part where we have to make difficult, potentially unpopular choices.

Using what we have

But, what we have now is unsustainable. It’s that simple. Among the e-mails I received after my last column on the homeless crisis was one from Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. I kind of like her, although she vehemently disagrees with me. She’s smart, she doesn’t yell, and she usually has some statistics, although I maintain that the numbers are sometimes fudged a bit to make her point.

At the end of her note she said, “this whole issue would be solved if we just made sure folks had a safe and decent place to call home.”

Simple, right? But let’s take a hypothetical look at that. And because this is hypothetical, I am going to give the mayor magic powers. Lee clicks his heels, and poof, housing is created for all 7,539 homeless people that were identified in the 2015 official count.

There we go. Problem solved. Except that later that afternoon a Greyhound bus pulls up to the Folsom Street station, and six people get off who have no place to stay. So we build six more units. And then another bus arrives with another eight folks.

A homeless panhandler plied his trade as traffic came off the freeway near 13th Street Wednesday July 15, 2015. Although San Francisco housed over 3000 homeless people in the last two years, the overall homeless count stubbornly remains about the same.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

We’ll never catch up. It will just take more money and more units, and attract more homeless residents.

What does make sense is to manage what we have. We need to get help for the mentally disturbed who walk the streets in confusion and pain. We need to create avenues for the truly down-on-their-luck types who just need an opportunity.

But we also need to move beyond the idea that living on the sidewalk and peeing and pooping on the street is an acceptable lifestyle choice. When he made his Super Bowl announcement, Lee said there would be a place for those people.

What must be done

That’s not going to be easy. Is it an urban campground? Or a series of shelters where people can stay? And who will monitor the sites and maintain order?

But that’s the point. These are the tough choices. It will be a difficult moment when you tell someone they have to get up, leave the sidewalk and move to an acceptable location. It won’t be pretty.

C.W. Nevius has been a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle for more than 20 years, covering sports, reviewing movies and spotting trends. He is currently a metro columnist, appearing on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

As a sports columnist, he climbed the ski jump at the Norway Olympics, ate bee larvae in Japan and skied in the French Alps. In all, he covered eight Olympic Games, from Australia to Spain to Korea. (And the strangest place of all, Los Angeles.)

He also wrote about riding the “Straight Talk Express” with John McCain during his first presidential bid, parachuting out of an airplane and running the Boston Marathon.

Although he reviewed movies only for a year, he did rate a blurb with his byline on the DVD box of “The Santa Clause 2,” to the undying embarrassment of his kids.

He co-wrote “Splash Hit,” about building the Giants’ waterfront stadium, with Joan Walsh. His latest book is “Crouching Father, Hidden Toddler: A Zen Guide for New Dads.”